Eulogy for Arthur Ben Chitty by John Chitty
We gather today to celebrate the life of Arthur Benjamin Chitty, Jr., resident and a leader in this community for 56 years. To truly honor such a man with mere words is inevitably impossible, but he would want us to plunge ahead; he was never shy of an oratorical challenge.
Arthur Ben was a blend of the Chitty family’s pragmatic determination and the Brown family’s fun-loving warmth. Charming, daring, intelligent, he successfully exposed the illusion of any difference between “work” and “play” by just enjoying everything he did, from picking up trash along University Avenue to scoring multimillion dollar gifts for the college. Why just serve pancakes to kids for breakfast, when you could also do it by climbing up on the table and pouring the syrup from a maximum elevation?
Arthur Ben was a Boy Scout, not just literally. He earned his Eagle medal and his 45 merit badges, pretty much the whole inventory at the time, and he must have been paying close attention when the Boy Scout pledge was recited. Trustworthy Loyal Helpful Friendly Courteous Kind Obedient Cheerful Thrifty Brave Clean and Reverent, that’s the big picture of Arthur Ben. In the words of his youngest sister, he was the best big brother a girl could have.
To tell about him, we should probably use a historical framework because that was his own way. Born and raised in Jacksonville Florida, he planned to start classes at the University of Florida in 1932. But he spent that summer at Eastbrook, a family-owned resort near Estill Springs, fell in with a fast crowd of Sewanee boys, went to a party on the mountain, and told his father he had changed his mind. Truth to tell, his father didn’t want him to go to college at all; he expected his son to follow him into the family wholesale grocery business, and told him, “Junior, if you go to college, it will ruin you as a grocery man!” Grandfather was right about that: Sewanee was love at first sight for Arthur Junior, and he had a spectacular college career, graduating Phi Beta Kappa in just three years and developing lifelong allegiances to his friends and his Sigma Nu brotherhood. This education stuck like glue, at age 87 he was inscribing Shakespearean sonnets to adorn his sister’s guest book and just last month he was using Latin and Greek to inspire his hospice nurse.
Following graduation he served a brief and successful stint in the family business as well as a fling with life’s fast track of high income and easy living. But he realized that he wanted something more, something inspiringly different from the world of commerce, so he shifted gears dramatically in his late twenties. He later said, “The turning point in my life was when I decided to follow in the footsteps of my father in terms of character.” Beginning in 1929, Grandfather Chitty had managed through a lifetime’s supply of stress: the death of his dear wife, being single parent of six children ages 2 to 16, and the business-ruining Great Depression. At his key turning point, Dad came to the conclusion that his father’s character demonstrated the values needed for navigating life’s changes.
Opportunity for a major lifestyle change arose in two parts. First of these was a brilliant opposites-attract romance with Betty Nickinson, a perfect earthy counterbalance to his mercurial temperament. Second came an almost-simultaneous invitation from Alexander Guerry to invent a position in Sewanee, something newfangled called “Public Relations,” at a fraction of the level of his then-current pay. With typical impulsiveness he jumped at both opportunities. The fates had conspired to create a direction to guide the subsequent 56 years.
Vice Chancellor Guerry was trying to pull Sewanee out of its dire post-Depression, post-War condition. Did he really comprehend what he was getting when he recruited Arthur Ben, and by association Betty Nick, to Sewanee? What a master-stroke of maybe-accidental genius! This pair would faithfully tend Guerry’s beloved garden for a half-century, outliving most of their contemporaries and leaving Sewanee in an elevated condition that Guerry could hardly have envisioned. Few have matched the breadth and depth of their impact here. One of Dad’s lifelong mottos was: “Let’s leave this place better than we found it!” Surely he and Betty Nick succeeded in this far beyond Guerry’s wildest dreams.
In his new position, Arthur would do anything, from licking stamps to hosting dignitaries. He was an abundant fountain of ideas in every area of Sewanee’s operation, infusing his visionary utopian attitude of unlimited possibilities into the mud of practical reality. Never mind that a certain percentage of these ideas were really impossible to ever implement, for him the joy was in the creativity.
Some examples of his diverse pursuits will help fill in the picture. As a young boy I remember his voice booming over the loudspeaker at Hardee Field announcing games. In 1959 he absconded with an entire printing of the student newspaper because he discovered it had a possibly imprudent comment, intended to be humorous, about a benefactor he was then courting? Some here may have taken his “history tour,” cruising all over the campus every Sunday summer afternoon in a school bus for the benefit of any visitor to the mountain who might have been mildly curious about the history of what he always called “the Domain.” He took leadership positions in the Sewanee Civic Association and Otey Parish church, and no task was too small or too large for his hands-on participation. In the 1950s he helped arrange for modern utility services and paved roads to be brought to Sewanee’s black community, then helped families get financing to renovate their homes. At the same time he had the University build the stone gates which mark the entrances to the Domain on Highway 64A. He and Betty Nick designed the history windows in the front of this chapel, and arranged for most of the plaques that you see on the walls here. They caused dozens of books to come into print, including their own titles, Ely Green’s and many more. I remember the day Ely came to our door, suitcase in hand with his life’s story hand-written on notebook paper. He introduced himself by saying, “I heard you are a friend to black people.” That night Mother read the pages aloud while I listened in the next room. Dad could not decipher Ely’s writing but Mother could, another example of their complementary skills. The resulting publication, Too Black, Too White, became a classic , a unique portrayal of a previously undocumented dimension of Sewanee’s history. The list of their diverse accomplishments goes on and on. All this and more was done not because anyone told him what to do, it was done because he just saw what needed doing and took it upon himself as one might approach a sporting challenge.
The area of civil rights was one of Arthur Ben’s more notable achievements. He and Betty Nick withstood opposition and penalties from their neighbors and bosses in their steady participation in the local civil rights cause. Today few eyewitnesses remain who can tell how in the 1960s Sewanee threw off the structural aspects of its legacy of bigotry. Arthur and Betty Nick were there throughout, though it cost them greatly.
The more obvious major area of achievement was Sewanee itself. He had the Midas Touch for Sewanee. His nonstop fundraising mobilized Sewanee’s resources to attract donations on an unprecedented scale, and many features of the campus that we today take for granted can be traced directly or indirectly to his activities. Supported by Betty Nick’s prodigious mental database of everyone who had ever attended any department of the University, he made a point of meeting, greeting and getting to know most of the alumni, in case any of them should ever become wealthy, plus basically all the Episcopal parish priests, in case any of their flocks should fall into that category, plus everyone of influence, in case any of those should ever happen across the path of either of the others, etc. etc. etc. He and Betty Nick knew, and were known by, virtually everyone connected to Sewanee.
As an example of his tenacious fundraising, beginning in the early 1950’s he regularly corresponded with Tennessee Williams’ mother, making the case that Williams’ Episcopal priest grandfather should be honored with a bequest to the University. Forty years later, the Tennessee Williams bequest became the University’s largest financial gift up to that time.
Along the way he interviewed all the old timers and secured their stories for posterity. In the 1950s he repeatedly visited ancient Mrs. Johnston, daughter of the bishop, near where the Lemon Fair is now, to hear her tell firsthand recollections of the War and Reconstruction. Of course, you are not wondering “Which War?” He had a deep fascination and encyclopedic knowledge of The Big One, Between the States. His formal title of “Historiographer” may have at first been an appointment of his own devising, concocted mainly to justify the information-gathering and storytelling that he loved so much. But the title became official, and he kept telling stories. And what a storyteller! He always kept his audiences on the edges of their seats, including Betty Nick, ever-cautious (not unrealistically) that his embellishments might favor drama over fact. They made a great combination, he loved fiction and colorful speculations while she held steady with the facts. When he bought the 1876 Quintard house on South Carolina Avenue, built around a log cabin that survived the Civil War, he could spread his storytelling wings as he described its origins and implications. His tales invoked the full spectrum of history and literature, liberally spiced with amazingly specific references to the likes of Homer, Shakespeare, Napoleon and Churchill.
As if Sewanee alone could not contain his vast energy, he later extended the same services to the whole Episcopal Church, occupying a variety of fundraising, publishing, community-building and history-recording roles. His tenure as President of the Association of Episcopal Colleges saw the same productivity and zest for life, only this time the beneficiaries were more numerous and more distant, such as in far-off Philippines or Liberia. His influential connections were especially useful in the latter, when his aggressive last-minute interventions saved lives at Cuttington College when civil war befell the country. Some in this chapel today can attest to this from personal experience.
Arthur Ben loved to travel, circumnavigating the globe in support of Episcopal causes and in fulfillment of his endless personal curiosity. He loved the bright lights of New York, its Century Club and theatre. He was a sharp dresser, a great dancer, a wisecracking jokester-philosopher, sort of a cross between W.C. Fields and C.S. Lewis. His living room was an intellectual salon for the free exchange of weighty insights spiced by streams of wry commentary. He loved to “interview” his guests, asking probing thoughtful questions to draw out details from their own worlds, enriching ours as a result as we vicariously traveled to foreign lands and dealt with the great issues of the day in these faraway places. No doubt many of you in this gathering have been quizzed by him in this way, and experienced the fulfilling feeling of being in the presence of a world-class listener.
He was fastidious in a fun-loving way. In Yugoslavia he made himself a celebrity by using his vacation to pick up all the trash from a stretch of beach, to the point where the locals got the idea and were inspired to continue. I wonder if that beach is still clean today? On family outings to the Farm Pond (he actively supported getting lakes built at Sewanee), he would load up the lawn mower while mom made the sandwiches. While we paddled around in the weedy water he would carve out a respectable picnic table area. That was his idea of a fun afternoon. He had a gift for visual symmetry and order, delighting in the perfection of a freshly-made bed, a well-knotted necktie, or a newly-mowed lawn.
He was the drama king of our family, encouraging us to play make-believe games (with maximum historical accuracy in terms of costumes and titles of course), and he spun ad hoc tales of Cherokee bravery that went on for months in daily bedtime installments. He hired us, with our friends, to stuff gift-solicitation envelopes on Sunday afternoons, then rewarded us with nickel cokes from the old machine and freewheeling races across Elliot Hall’s vast tile floor in the secretaries’ roller chairs, banking off filing cabinets. Other Sundays you might find us all out at the Sewanee airport’s empty landing strip, the yellow station wagon over-filled with riotous kids as he swerved back and forth in the open space, braking and accelerating abruptly to give us our own amusement park joy ride.
With Betty Nick he created a dynamic tension at 100 South Carolina Avenue, his rabble-rousing arrayed against her common sense, that kept us always curious about the next chapter. He had a flair for photography, snapping improbable child’s play fantasies that still make us laugh. He loved the flow of visitors, providing a Southern Gentleman’s hospitality that tended to begin with the words “What’ll you have?” and he relished the semi-public nature of our home with its steady flow of visitors from around the world.
Dad personified the Christian ideal of steadfast faith arising from authentic philosophical depth. Once I asked him how he had managed to get through his tough times, and he answered, “I never really had any” meaning that anything was manageable with the right attitude. When he was in one of his medical crises recently, and the doctor told him that he was drawing near the end, he slowly replied in his stroke-impaired pronunciation, “These are the last days or weeks of my life and I face them with equanimity.” The doctor’s response was “Would you say that again?”– he had never heard such words of philosophical strength in these circumstances. In discussing impending death I asked him to express his spiritual beliefs and he responded, “They have not changed, it is the same for me now as it has always been.” On the morning of his death I was visiting with him. I asked, “How are you Dad?” “Fabuhlus” was his reply. He was weakened in pronunciation skills but never in spirit.
St. Paul tells us in the 8th chapter of his Epistle to the Romans that as God's creatures we are awaiting the full manifestation of what it means to be "Sons of God." St. Paul says that the sufferings of this present time cannot be compared with the glory that shall be revealed in us when we meet our Maker. When my father had to suffer the impediments of his stroke, he nevertheless had the kind of faith to be able to say that he felt "fabuhlus" even though he was unable to articulate the word fully. Somehow he knew that in good time he would become what almighty God made possible: a perfect son of God, everything he was created to be, everything that was promised for him in the Risen Life of Christ. It is a great gift to us all to contemplate today Arthur Ben Chitty in this realized state, in the company of his savior, for now he is surely “Fabulous” in the Grace of God’s company forever.
